Vale Joan Valance

Joan Valance, Controversial Beauty Queen, Dies at 83 (Half-a-Grand Flash Fiction Contest Entry)

Of all the crazes to sweep America in the 1950s — Martin and Lewis, hula hoops, anti-communist paranoia — perhaps none seems stranger to us today than the nation’s brief passion for competitive radiography. Yet in their heyday, such contests were extremely popular, and flagship pageants such as Miss Roentgen or Miss Eutrophic would regularly achieve higher ratings than better-remembered rivals such as Miss America or Miss Universe.

Competition winners — known in the trade as “radiator girls” — graced the covers of magazines like Life and Look and were mainstays in all the gossip columns. They popped up on radio shows and were especially embraced by the emerging medium of television, with Groucho Marx memorably describing Miss Radiation 1958 as having “a great set of gams, and one heck of a thorax.”

Over time, health concerns and changing attitudes saw the pageants lose their grip on the collective imagination, and the final competition took place in October 1963, just months before the Beatles’ appearance on Ed Sullivan. As luck would have it, the three podium finishers in that competition — all smiles in the photograph accompanying this article — were perhaps the biggest (and some would say the most notorious) names that ever took the stage.

Far left is Betty Arnold, who later became a key organizer of the 1968 Miss America Protest and a prominent second-wave feminist. She is best known today for her national lecture tours, where she would electrify audiences from California to Tennessee with her rallying cry, “Change is coming, I can feel it in my bones!”

But it is the two other women whose names and fates are bound together in a way that neither could have imagined.

In the center, we see winner Patty Miller, who would go missing just hours after this photograph.

And on the right, runner-up Joan Valance, who, along with her then-fiancé (now ex-husband) Mickey “The Brute” Kowalski, would — after seven years, two mistrials, and thousands of pages of newsprint — be acquitted of Patty’s murder.

The trials dominated the late 1960s news cycle in a way that is hard for us now to comprehend — imagine the O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson trials rolled into one, and you might get close — but given the fame of both victim and alleged killer, and lurid details of the case, it could hardly be otherwise. A crime in which the victim’s body is dismembered — and its parts mailed to a series of seemingly random addresses — barely needs further sensationalizing, yet the press of the day certainly gave it their best shot.

As we mark her death from lung cancer this week, it is important to remember that despite persistent rumors, Joan was never held responsible for any crime. Still, her reputation never recovered, and after her release, she withdrew from public life.

As to the nicknames that swirled in the wake of the trials, she made no comment, but sources close to the family report that she detested one epithet most of all: “Saw loser.”